[Question] If a “Kickstarter for Inadequate Equlibria” was built, do you have a concrete inadequate equilibrium to fix?

i.e. a site where, if there’s a lo­cally bad equil­ibrium that would be bet­ter if ev­ery­one changed strate­gies at once, but which re­quires a crit­i­cal mass of peo­ple in or­der to be worth­while, you can all say “I’ll put the effort if other peo­ple put in the effort”, and then if X peo­ple agree, you all go into work the next day and de­mand a policy change, or a go to a poli­ti­cal rally, or change a so­cial norm, or what­ever.

Some at­tempts have been made at such a sys­tem. It’s not that tech­ni­cally hard to build. But I think it’d need a cou­ple ma­jor “flag­ship” Co­or­di­nated Ac­tions in or­der to rally peo­ple’s at­ten­tion and turn it into a more fre­quently used tool.

So, if a good web­site ex­isted to co­or­di­nate ac­tion, do you have a well op­er­a­tional­ized ac­tion you’d want to co­or­di­nate? (“Every­one leaves Face­book at once” doesn’t work IMO, be­cause it doesn’t say where peo­ple are mov­ing to, or oth­er­wise re­plac­ing FB’s tools with.

“Every­one on one plat­form switches to an­other plat­form” seems vi­able.

“Every­one at my office signs a let­ter de­mand­ing change for a par­tic­u­lar policy” seems vi­able (al­though in cases like this, where you maybe don’t want your boss to know you’re plan­ning a rev­olu­tion, and I’m not sure how to best achieve com­mon knowl­edge with­out risk)

Meta note: I’ll likely edit this an­swer when I think of more an­swers.

Gen­eral note: If you’re in­ter­ested in any of the propo­si­tions be­low (ex­cept the first one), please let me know, ei­ther here or at con­tact@matiroy.com .

Boot­strap­ping a com­mit­ment platform

Make at least 5 com­mit­ments if a com­mit­ment plat­form is cre­ated (or rather, the cre­ator might want to com­mit to im­prov­ing a bare-bone plat­form if at least 200 peo­ple com­mit to make a to­tal of at least 1,000 com­mit­ments).

If 75 EAs /​ ra­tio­nal­ists /​ life ex­ten­sion­ists com­mit­ted to move to Phoenix this year, I’d move to Phoenix this year.

Fi­nanc­ing cry­on­ics research

If 500 other peo­ple com­mit­ted 10,000 USD to cry­on­ics re­search, I would give 10,000 USD to cry­on­ics re­search.

Do­ing a cry­on­ics re­lated PhD

I would do a PhD in some field rele­vant to cry­on­ics if some peo­ple com­mit­ted a frac­tion of my salary to do cry­on­ics re­search over 10 years. That is, they would give say 20% (or 10k USD /​ year) of my salary to what­ever cry­on­ics lab that hires me.

Train­ing a lo­cal cry­on­ics team

I would ar­range to have a lo­cal (to Mon­treal) standby cry­on­ics team if at least 500,000 CAD was com­mit­ted (ex­act amount TBD). (Although I guess I could just use Kick­starter for that, or do it en­tirely ad hoc?)

Or­ga­niz­ing Ra­tion­al­ist Olympiads

If 12+ peo­ple com­mit­ted to go to Ra­tion­al­ist Olympiads (in Mon­treal), I would or­ga­nize Ra­tion­al­ist Olympiads.

Be­cause it’s near the best cry­on­ics fa­cil­ity in the world: https://​​al­cor.org, and the qual­ity of cry­op­reser­va­tions for peo­ple liv­ing in Phoenix is much higher in av­er­age than re­mote cases (it re­duces the de­lay to start the pro­ce­dure, it avoids prob­lems at bor­ders, the de­lay to start the sub-zero cool-down is shorter, they have good re­la­tion­ships with nearby hos­pi­tals, they have bet­ter in­fras­truc­ture, and there’s more le­gal an­tecedent sup­port­ing cry­on­ics).

Inad­e­quate Equil­ibrium (IE) - Is­raeli me­dia is in­ad­e­quate at dis­qual­ify­ing Bibi. Co­or­di­nated ac­tion (CA) - an at­ten­tion boy­cott of Ben­jamin Ne­tanyahu (PM of Is­rael). not go­ing into de­tail—ba­si­cally it seems that any at­ten­tion given to him, whether in good or bad light, is only helping him. but he also brings a lot of of rat­ing (Well, similar to trump, this would have been even more fit­ting for him). The aim is for me­dia peo­ple on the left (in Is­rael), i es­ti­mate at least 1000 me­dia per­sonal will­ing to join if the other 1000 do too (I also think of a few spe­cific peo­ple who i think will join).

IE—ve­g­ans aren’t ad­e­quate enough at chang­ing mar­ket norms. CA—buy­ing only from 100% ve­gan com­pa­nies, if at least 200,000 other ve­g­ans do so too. I’m not sure if it’s fea­si­ble in 2019 (Both i terms of mar­ket, and will­ing­ness for ve­g­ans), but it’s some­thing i can see, and would likely join, in the fea­ture.

IE—ve­g­ans can be more ad­e­quate at re­duc­ing suffer­ing. CA—Adopt­ing a wider defi­ni­tion of ve­g­anism, to in­clude avoid­ing things like palm oil, i think it’s a good thing to do, but would do it only if there’s a ma­jor move­ment in that di­rec­tion, in­clud­ing with ve­gan Food pro­duc­ers. In Is­rael I es­ti­mate it’s fea­si­ble to get at least 40,000 ve­g­ans (Out of half a mil­lion) on board, to­gether with many pro­duc­ers (which will make even ve­g­ans who didn’t com­mit con­sume less of these)

IE—school start times are hurt­ing stu­dents health and cog­ni­tive abil­ities. CA—Ar­riv­ing a hour and half late if a 150 other stu­dents do too. Would have been fea­si­ble in the school I’ve been in.

Hmm… yeah i guess, though it will be “against” the school, not the state. also it’s a demo­cratic school, so it will prob­a­bly be seen in a bet­ter light.

But yeah, it brings up again the eth­i­cal is­sue of whether such a web­site should only al­low ac­tion that obey the law. I think this case of civil di­s­obe­di­ence should be al­lowed, but do we want all civil di­s­obe­di­ence to be al­lowed?

Maybe the spirit of this mar­tin Luther king quote is right

“Any man who breaks a law that con­science tells him is un­just and will­ingly ac­cepts the penalty by stay­ing in jail in or­der to arouse the con­science of the com­mu­nity on the in­jus­tice of the law is at that mo­ment ex­press­ing the very high­est re­spect for law”

Nod. I asked the ques­tion mostly just to clar­ify what you meant. But I do think it’s prob­a­bly nec­es­sary for the tool to ban ille­gal things, if only be­cause oth­er­wise it’ll come un­der fire from gov­ern­ments.

I do feel like the ideal out­come is some­how “you can use to the tool to co­or­di­nate civil di­s­obe­di­ence but only when it’s… ‘good’”, but I think it’d be both too hard a le­gal bat­tle and also too hard to thread the nee­dle of “not ac­ci­den­tally caus­ing a bunch of weirdly bad out­comes.”

I do think “ev­ery­one shows up late for school ev­ery day un­til the policy changes” is prob­a­bly fine.

Pay­ing peo­ple to con­tribute to open-source soft­ware pro­jects. Some­times, I’m us­ing a soft­ware pack­age, wish it had a cer­tain fea­ture, but don’t care enough to fix it my­self or to pay some­body else to fix it. It would be nice if there were a kick­starter-type mechanism to make things like this hap­pen. A similar ex­am­ple would be work­ing to make re­ciproc­ity (a dat­ing site many peo­ple in my so­cial cir­cle use) bet­ter. [In fact, I’m sur­prised that it doesn’t hap­pen more on Kick­starter. But you don’t want ex­actly that plat­form, since pro­ject pro­posal should prob­a­bly be on the con­sumer side.]

Get­ting com­mu­nity tri­als of var­i­ous po­ten­tial nootrop­ics to hap­pen, e.g. Paul Chris­ti­ano’s pro­posal of repli­cat­ing a study of the cog­ni­tive benefits of cre­a­tine among veg­e­tar­i­ans.

Obli­gate to turn ve­gan if a hun­dred thou­sand more do so too. (There are many peo­ple who say that they alone won’t make any differ­ence)

you could gen­er­ate dozens of ex­am­ples from “plat­form1>plat­form2”

Do­ing/​giv­ing cer­tain stuff for free (Say, shar­ing food)

Any­thing vot­ing related

Mov­ing to open ac­cess jour­nals, and i this spirit, chang­ing the P-value, per-anounce method­ol­ogy, change grant and re­view sys­tem, etc..

Boy­cotts (not sure if there’s any plat­form more effec­tive for that than FaceBook, which isn’t very effec­tive), and with this site you would also be able to de­cide on the al­ter­na­tive (if you want only one)

So, im­por­tant sub­ques­tions here are: which of these are some­thing where, a) if the tools all ex­isted, you would be ready right now to change your own be­hav­ior if only the tools and ex­isted, and b) you feel like you have a net­work or a plan to get the rele­vant peo­ple on board?

It’s not that I can’t think of in­ad­e­quate equil­ibria, it’s that I’m not sure whether there’s shovel-ready in­ad­e­quate equil­ibria, where there’s 100 − 100,000 peo­ple who’d be ex­cited to com­mit and are just wait­ing on the tool.

Often, when you’re launch­ing a product, it’s im­por­tant to have a niche tar­get au­di­ence who is re­ally ex­cited for your product (even if even­tu­ally, upon hit­ting crit­i­cal mass, the bulk of the value will go to peo­ple to are only mod­er­ately ex­cited). This means you need to iden­tify a clear, press­ing need.

It may be that Col­lAc­tion is a good enough tool, or might not. [con­text here for other read­ers]. If it didn’t ex­ist (or isn’t good enough), I might be in­ter­ested in putting $5,000 of my own money to­wards mak­ing such a pro­ject, and/​or in­vest $5,000 worth of my time and so­cial cap­i­tal to­wards helping it launch. But if there isn’t a con­crete tar­get au­di­ence and con­crete plan of ac­tion that seems worth at least $5,000, and in­stead it’s just “it seems like some­one would prob­a­bly use this”, I’m way less ex­cited to put effort in.

(For ex­am­ple, for the vot­ing or open ac­cess jour­nals, you ac­tu­ally need the peo­ple who could change those jour­nals or vot­ing rules to already be ba­si­cally on board)

(re vot­ing – it may warm your heart to know there is already a col­lec­tive ac­tion plan for re­mov­ing the US Elec­toral Col­lege. One by one, some states are com­mit­ting that IF 270 elec­toral-col­lege-votes-worth-of-states join a con­tract, that all states in that con­tract will give all their elec­toral col­lege votes to who­ever wins the pop­u­lar vote.

In vot­ing thought es­pe­cially on Is­rael (where i live). here there are 120 seats in the par­li­a­ment, and there are many par­ties that you may vote for. when elec­tions are over, each 1⁄120 of to­tal votes gets the party a seat. But, if you don’t get enough votes for at least 4 seats, you don’t en­ter at all.

So, there’s is a party which is all about ve­g­anism, and it never passes en­try thresh­old (al­though there are half a mil­lion ve­g­ans, which is 7-8 times enough for that). apart from it not be­ing very well known, most peo­ple who know about don’t want to vote for it cause it’ll be a wasted vote.

I’d be happy to vote for it if i know that a 60,000 peo­ple com­mit to do the same.

Already a ve­gan, but it’s likely that i would be will­ing to make an­other diet change that seems rea­son­able if it has enough mo­men­tum.

I’m already not us­ing most plat­forms which an ex­o­dus from will be pop­u­lar, but nei­ther am i on an al­ter­na­tive, so i might join the al­ter­na­tive part of the move­ment.

In my last house i had many fruit trees, would have been glad to share them.

Not a sci­en­tists.

Sure, I’d boy­cott any­thing that seems rea­son­able.

Was these the an­swers you were look­ing for in the first ques­tion?

Get­ting peo­ple on board re­quires cam­paign­ing, the day in which it won’t will be very happy in­deed. I had a few ideas for how to build it into the sys­tem, but of course it won’t be enough. peo­ple who want to co­or­di­nate ac­tions will have to put a lot of effort into it. not like in Col­lAc­tion, where you might post an ac­tion, and for­get about it for the rest of time.

Sense we’re talk­ing about it in LessWrong, we should (at least cur­rently) think of it as the tar­get au­di­ence, ask­ing what equil­ibria will the LW com­mu­nity want to change (ei­ther by it­self or by cam­paign­ing), ready to put effort into it, and need­ing a co­or­di­nated ac­tion.

You have a bunch of stuff that needs to get from one point in a city to an­other. Which is more efficient

Hav­ing the cus­tomer use a whole car to drive to a place, get their thing, then drive home?

Or hav­ing a bunch of ve­hi­cles, each car­ry­ing a large amount of stuff, vis­it­ing mul­ti­ple peo­ple per round-trip.

The prob­lem is, if you have a very nar­row de­liv­ery win­dow- 20 min­utes af­ter the or­der is placed- you wont gen­er­ally have enough or­ders to batch your de­liv­er­ies to­gether like that.

If we want to get to the world where 10 de­liv­er­ies can be made per trip, we just need lots and lots of peo­ple to be us­ing the food de­liv­ery sys­tem. Cur­rently, the price of de­liv­ered food is pro­hibitive, and in­stead peo­ple opt to ei­ther eat at ex­pen­sive rent-cap­tured main-street restau­rants, or, more fre­quently, to cook for them­selves (sub­sis­tence econ­omy much!)

Hav­ing a scaled de­liv­ery econ­omy al­lows food pro­duc­tion to move away from main-streets, or to move into de­liv­ery-only restau­rants, dra­mat­i­cally low­er­ing their rent and low­er­ing the price of fresh-cooked food along with it.

This tran­si­tion may hap­pen or­gan­i­cally, but this is not as­sured. The cur­rent mar­ket leader in most cities is Uber, who take a very large cut, seem to be very in­effi­cient as a soft­ware pro­ducer (so maybe couldn’t lower their fees even if they wanted to), don’t pay drivers well and are ter­rible for restau­rants, hav­ing a fairly evil policy of tak­ing a per­centage of the or­der (on top of a flat fee) even though the ser­vice they’re pro­vid­ing pretty much doesn’t have costs pro­por­tionate to the cost of the or­der, then, iirc, they for­bid restau­rants from rais­ing the price of the menu items to cover that.

I would pro­pose to switch to a par­tic­u­lar low-over­head food de­liv­ery sys­tem now, but I don’t know of any. Low-cost soft­ware in­fras­truc­ture may be a kind of product that can only thrive once we have co­or­di­nated com­mit­ment plat­forms. Without a method for man­i­fest­ing an egg with­out the pro­hibitively costly chick­ens of risk-amor­ti­sat­ing in­vest­ment and ad­ver­tis­ing, there’s no in­cen­tive to build or talk about the can­di­dates. We might have tens of vi­able uber clones ly­ing around with hy­per­com­pe­tent twenty per­son dev teams, we wouldn’t talk about them, we seem to be too un­co­or­di­nated to lift them up, there would be no point.

(Although I have to ask; why don’t restau­rants sim­ply fund the de­vel­op­ment of their own de­liv­ery in­fras­truc­ture? They have all the ad-space they could need.)

Also, sig­na­to­ries should com­mit to get­ting some kind of stan­dard lock­able street-side box so that the de­liv­erer doesn’t have to exit their ve­hi­cle and find their way to the door.

Peo­ple in a city switch from us­ing cars to us­ing other forms of trans­port.

Switch­ing from worse dat­ing sites to some­thing bet­ter.

Peo­ple in a group house switch­ing from defect­ing on clean­ing the house out of ex­pec­ta­tion oth­ers won’t help clean, to one in which ev­ery­one starts clean­ing be­cause they ex­pect oth­ers to co­op­er­ate in clean­ing.

Buy­ing or rent­ing an oth­er­wise too-ex­pen­sive prop­erty.

Switch­ing from the Mul­ti­player Game That Every­one Is Play­ing to a Bet­ter Mul­ti­player Game.

Switch­ing to a new re­li­gion from Chris­ti­an­ity.

Ac­countabil­ity con­tracts—“I’ll en­gage in habit X if Y other peo­ple are also en­gag­ing in Habit X con­di­tional on Y other peo­ple en­gag­ing in Habit X”

Re­cruit­ing peo­ple to make world record at­tempts that in­volve large num­bers of peo­ple, where it’s not worth marginally join­ing if that doesn’t look likely and there­fore it doesn’t get off the ground.

Re­cruit­ing peo­ple to do things that would oth­er­wise re­sult in the po­lice ar­rest­ing them if there were a smaller amount of peo­ple, e.g. 1 mil­lion peo­ple us­ing psychedelics as a protest in Wash­ing­ton D.C.

Peo­ple at­tend­ing events in gen­eral! Many events don’t have a crit­i­cal mass to seem wor­thy of join­ing on the mar­gin.

Start­ing an ex­er­cise cir­cle if there are 5 other peo­ple to also start it with.

Go­ing through a course of study if there are 10 other peo­ple to also study it with.

Switch­ing peo­ple from Bit­coin to what­ever is bet­ter (how would peo­ple de­cide that?).

Meta: suffi­cient amount of peo­ple co­or­di­nat­ing to use the same Kick­starter for Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria. (I’m sorry)

So, one of the things that might be tricky about a tool, where peo­ple make com­mit­ments of the form “I’ll do X if Y% of peo­ple do X” is that there can be more than one fixed point. Ad­ding the “friends” con­straint adds a graph the­ory as­pect to it. (And makes it sound like the product is go­ing to need to be like Face­book.)

I would sys­tem­at­i­cally de­stroy se­lected in­va­sive species (like Am­brosia artemisiifo­lia or Her­a­cleum sos­nowskyi) in the lo­cal­ities I know, and seek out new lo­cal­ities, if ten more peo­ple pledged to do the same and at least one per­son ac­com­pa­nies me ev­ery time for safety rea­sons (and hope­fully to dig along). The main effect would be ed­u­cat­ing lo­cal peo­ple, of course, since I know for a fact that some still *plant* Her­a­cleum “be­cause it is im­pres­sive”. Hope­fully if such at­ti­tude to the species be­comes more wide­spread, we could de­mand changes in lo­cal leg­is­la­ture which would make the rele­vant state agen­cies ac­tu­ally do some­thing about the is­sue. There’s just no rea­son why we should have such dan­ger­ous aliens in our en­vi­ron­ment (Am­brosia pro­duces lots of air­borne aller­genic pol­len, while con­tact with Her­a­cleum makes skin pho­to­sen­si­tive, which in the worst case causes death from un­heal­ing “chem­i­cal” burns.) There are, of course, many other in­va­sive species, but I would tar­get the worst threats.

How­ever, I also ex­pect to be look­ing for a job… or em­i­grate.

(EDIT: to be clear, sys­tem­atic at­tempts to erad­i­cate Am­brosia are already hap­pen­ing in some ar­eas of my coun­try, and some of them are cit­i­zens’ ini­ti­a­tives far more in­dus­tri­ally scaled than any­thing I can af­ford. Which is ad­mirable, but also not some­thing most peo­ple can af­ford, too.)

Per­haps we need a list of in­ad­e­quate equil­ibria. I’ve thought be­fore it could be in­ter­est­ing to have some cu­rated set of (ideally well-re­searched and dis­cussed) ‘hey this thing is dumb’. Things like higher ed­u­ca­tion cost dis­ease, pay­walled sci­en­tific jour­nals, first-past-the-post vot­ing in demo­cratic elec­tions, etc. Even if we don’t have co­her­ent solu­tions yet, it would be good to be able to eas­ily see the scope.

Note: Sev­eral of the sug­ges­tions have been some­what generic. That is good for gen­eral brain­storm­ing, but I do want to clar­ify, I’m hop­ing for spe­cific, con­crete, shovel-ready ac­tions, that you per­son­ally would do, and prefer­ably that you cred­ibly be­lieve other peo­ple would do, such that the only miss­ing in­gre­di­ent is the co­or­di­na­tion tool.

(So, “Move from Berkeley to Wis­con­sin” works if you ac­tu­ally live in Berkeley and ac­tu­ally think you + other ra­tio­nal­ists should move to Wis­con­sin, and prefer­ably if you ac­tu­ally know at least a few peo­ple who would se­ri­ously move to Wis­con­sin if N other peo­ple moved to Wis­con­sin. Whereas “Move from X to Y” sounds more like some­thing some­one might want to do, but I’m look­ing for things peo­ple ac­tu­ally want to co­or­di­nate on in 2019.

Didn’t mean to pick on the Move X to Y sug­ges­tion in par­tic­u­lar, most of the other an­swers so far felt similar. It was just the eas­iest ex­am­ple)

A sin­gle or small num­ber of an­swers you are quite ex­cited about, sorter by how many other peo­ple you ex­pect to be ex­cited about it (With es­ti­ma­tions) would be best

I would add, that ac­tions with 150+ peo­ple are prefer­able, since this is about the range where hu­mans start hav­ing a re­ally hard time co­or­di­nat­ing (be­low that, you usu­ally don’t need a full-blown web­site, you can make a col­lec­tive de­ci­sion in eas­ier ways)

An im­por­tant met­ric is an in­de­pen­dent ex­pert es­ti­mate of how likely a par­tic­u­lar equil­ibrium will be shaken if there is a large-scale co­or­di­na­tion effort, and what po­ten­tial costs might be. Strikes, lo­cal­ized (e.g. at a Wal­mart store) or coun­try-wide (an air-traf­fic con­trol­ler strike dur­ing Rea­gan years) of­ten back­fire badly. An in­side es­ti­mate is guaran­teed to be heav­ily bi­ased, and so is largely use­less. So I would run any sug­ges­tion for a kick­starter like that through a pay­off es­ti­mate filter.

Ac­tu­ally Rae­mon asked speci­fi­cally about such pos­si­ble nega­tive out­comes here. I only point it out be­cause I think you make a valuable point and I’d be in­ter­ested to see any fur­ther dis­cus­sions of it.

I was talk­ing with a friend just tonight about how sci­en­tific jour­nals take months to get sub­mis­sions re­viewed, even though most re­view­ers do all of the re­views at the last minute, or pass it on to their grad stu­dents.

I think academia could be sig­nifi­cantly less stress­ful if ev­ery­one ac­tu­ally finished re­views promptly. It’s very de­mor­al­iz­ing (at least in my ex­pe­rience as a grad stu­dent) to pick up a pa­per that you thought was done months ago and have to fix it up again af­ter it’s been re­jected.

But un­for­tu­nately, there’s lit­tle benefit in that for the re­view­ers them­selves. And academia seems par­tic­u­larly re­sis­tant to any at­tempts to change things.

Hmm. This doesn’t seem quite like the right sort of change. I don’t think re­view­ers pro­cras­ti­nate be­cause they think ev­ery­one else pro­cras­ti­nate, and would change if ev­ery­one else would. I think they pro­cras­ti­nate for the same rea­sons most peo­ple do – gen­eral willpower failure or not car­ing.

A ver­sion of this that might work is (if there are dead­lines, and they are wait­ing till the last minute to do the work), sim­ply short­en­ing the dead­line.

Or if you can get a bunch of re­view­ers to­gether in a room. The is­sue might be—if I do this fast/​on time, what hap­pens? It’s still on slow/​late un­less ev­ery­one else alsogets it done on fast/​on time.

Nod. But that seems far less scal­able, and mean­while the re­view­ers don’t ac­tu­ally have much in­cen­tive to even want that. I as­sume the benefits ac­crue when you can ex­pect that if you re­view things more promt­ply, this means later you can rea­son­able ex­pect a pa­per you sub­mit some­where to get re­viewed more promt­ply.